A Special Memory Quilt

Last summer, my aunt Nancy was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer and passed away in late September. She will be missed by all of us, but especially by my cousin and my mom. It’s fitting that my last project of 2024, and my first finish of 2025, was this quilt made for my cousin from 10 of Aunt Nancy’s favorite shirts.

In my experience, the biggest challenge of t-shirt/memory quilts has nothing to do with the sewing. I used a very lightweight interfacing to stabilize all of the shirts, and that adds time and effort to the quilt-making process, but it’s the design that is the hardest part for me. Obviously I wanted to use every single shirt, but how do I make black, white, red, blue, dusty green, and light purple all work together?

Ultimately, I landed on something loosely based on my own Sunsparks pattern. I chose a dark purple background fabric because purple was Aunt Nancy’s favorite color, and I felt it worked well with the shirt colors. Everything else came from the shirts themselves! Using 5 of the shirts for the half-square triangles allowed me to spread those colors around the quilt top, and made the whole color palette look a lot more cohesive.

Nine of the shirts had large-scale designs featured in the center of each block, and the tenth shirt only had a small patch on the chest. I was able to use that patch, plus two other fussy-cut pieces, as “cornerstones.” (They weren’t square, and they didn’t all run in the same direction, which presented a bit of a partial seam puzzle!)

Aunt Nancy loved each of the cats she had over the year, and she lived most of her life in Chapel Hill, NC. I selected a black cat print for the backing and a Carolina blue print for the binding as a nod to those things.

I quilted this over the course of the holiday break, so my sister was able to see it in progress when she and her family were visiting us. I didn’t want to draw attention from the shirts and I didn’t want it to feel too stiff — it was already bulky enough from the thickness of the shirts and the interfacing I used on those fabrics. I ended up choosing a simple looping pantograph and sized it pretty large. I’m happy to report that the quilt softened up quite nicely after its first washing!

I put the final stitches in the binding in mid-January on the morning I flew to visit my parents for a week while my mom recovered from knee surgery. I was able to show the finished quilt to my mom in person, and my dad held it up for the photos you see here. My mom sent it on to my cousin, who received it last week. This was a very special project for me, and I hope my cousin will find comfort in it for years to come.

The stats:

• Quilt measures 63″ x 69″.
• Fabrics are 10 t-shirts plus Chalk & Charcoal fabric in Noble Purple (by Jennifer Sampou for Robert Kaufman).
• Backing is Having a Meowment wideback fabric by Dear Stella.
• Binding is Moonscape in Capri by Dear Stella.
• Batting is Hobbs 80/20 cotton/poly.
• Pieced with Aurifil 50 wt thread in dove and navy.
• Quilted on my APQS Millie with Glide thread in a light pink/purple on the top and black on the back.
• Pantograph is Uneven Wishbone by The Quilting Mill.